Why Twitter has run into trouble | Hacker News Reader

Why Twitter has run into trouble

economist.com

60 pointswyclif79 comments

Twitter is a poster child for why diversity is key. Not racial, but socioeconomic. Twitter is very popular with people who have reached a certain threshold of technical competence. After that though it falls away quickly. They needed to really hire non SF based techno geeks and advisors to change the product. It was pretty telling when older people on their board never used it.

My Dad loves FB; he's kind of the family stalker now where no picture or comment goes unnoticed! He really wanted to use Twitter but has given up after multiple failed attempts. I think that's their problem in a nutshell. He so wanted it to work.

Your dad sounds like me! I can #not @understand @twitter #at #all. Every message is 90% noise.

Facebook on the other hand, is full of interesting news from people I love. Technology has come a long way when I get more accurate news from my mums friends than I do from the local TV news station. Our village had floods and the local pumping station failed, Facebook friends (and shared posts) kept us all in the loop and organised sands bags, pumps and help for the elderly.

I'm a pretty tech savvy guy, a pretty competent programmer and data analyst, and I cannot figure out how to use Twitter. I mean, I know physically how to create an account and tweet, and I've made multiple tries of getting into it, but can't find a use for it. So much noise.

If you think Twitter is too noisy, it's probably a sign that you're following too many people.

Yeah, you really have to cull it. If someone in your timeline isn't posting things you enjoy reading, remove them. I use it primarily as a media consumption device; I follow people who create and say things I enjoy. I only follow one or two personal friends. The idea of using it for any serious communication is ludicrous.

Or too many noisy people. Some folks can literally drown your timeline.

How is the user supposed to know how many people is a good amount to follow? I think that is Twitter's problem, not the user's.

It's definitely a problem, which is why I recommend following very incrementally. If you add too many power users at once, it gets noisy fast.

Doesn't even sound like the GP is even following anyone. I've known a few people for whom the twitter interface and, well, really, the whole platform, just doesn't make much sense. It never clicks with them. None of these people had the "whoah... you're following way too many people!" problem. Almost the opposite, in most cases.

The problem is that I want to hear x's opinion on rails but I could care less about what music he's listening to now or what country he's traveling to now.

This is the exact problem that an algorithmic timeline is intended to solve.

Maybe not every tweet is as important as all the others. Maybe I want to follow a lot of interesting people, but not necessarily see every tweet about how much they like the hotel breakfast, or whether the conference provided a good enough AV system, or how good the broadband is in various SF neighborhoods.

When I do check out someone's twitter post (e.g. sanders, or dan harmon) then the replies are total junk. HN has tons of interesting people replying, twitter posts have tons of junk/spam as replies.

This has been my experience as well. They could learn from the improvements that YouTube has made to its comment section.

Though, I realize that chronological tweet order is important to the core user-base.

I've been saying that for a while: twitter is YouTube without the video.

For me, every social media site is like this. The only reason I can even stand Tumblr is that half the blogs I follow only post once or twice a day.

I've never got on with Twitter either. Most people I am interested in are on Facebook if they use any social media. Twitter is just boring stuff.

Twitter is the Two Minutes of Hate mixed with memes

Meaning absolutely no offense, I don't understand how this is possible. The whole point of twitter is that you choose who you follow - if someone is noisy, why not unfollow them and never hear from them again?

Is it maybe that you haven't followed anyone yet, and twitter is showing you miscellaneous junk because they're too daft to show you a "hey you should search for some people you're interested in" dialog?

While in theory it's possible , it takes a lot of work to curate twitter for a high signal/noise level, if it's even possible.

Personally i find that if you care for higher snr, curating blogs and newsletters works better.

Besides that , twitter is sometimes nice for conversations. But not so much as to be worth the hassle of using it.

Unless you're following spambots I guess we have different notions of signal/noise. If I follow e.g. William Gibson because I'm interested in hearing what he has to say, and he says something about a topic I'm not interested in, is that noise?

Gibson is smart and interesting, sure. But if he says something i'm not interested in ,yes , for me, on the web, it's noise.

Maybe trying to cram everything into 140 characters including links and hash tags is just too much for me. Look at all the replies to me, they are all written in normal English words with not a single #tag in sight.

I've mentioned this before, but Twitter is what you make of it—your experience is entirely dictated by who you choose to follow.

If you want to have a good experience on Twitter, here are my suggestions:

- Keep the number of people you follow under 1,000. I follow about 600. Any more than 1,000 and it starts to become information overload.

- Keep the quality of the people you follow exceptionally high. Look through their recent Tweets and see if they post content you're interested in before following.

- Unfollow accounts that add to the noise. Don't want to see every TechCrunch article? Unfollow them. One thing I've discovered is that individual journalists are much more interesting than following publications wholesale.

Holy crow, 1000? I follow about 40 :)

200 here but I'd guess at least 50 of those are dormant these days. Even with that, it's still quite spammy some days.

I follow about 4, but I heavily use hashtag searches for real time information. I started using it during the 2011 riots in London to see how my commute was being affected.

I follow about 1200 but the number of accounts that are still active are probably around 100. Lots of failed startups and joke accounts in there.

I never got it either, beyond spamming links and self promotion. To me it was like sitting in an IRC channel, where everyone was force to write in a shortened, convoluted way. Trying to engage message threads was infuriating. I do see a positive side to it, mentioned earlier. It's a decent way of broadcasting real time news, and I think Twitter should focus on that aspect.

Facebook is pretty hard to use, though. I started using it late and it was tough. You just don't notice the complexity of FB because you are used to it by now.

Also, I am not convinced Twitter has to be liked by everybody. No product has to be liked by everybody.

They needed to really hire non SF based techno geeks and advisors

Twitter should be led by someone who is strong in PR. PR is where Twitter has excelled most. I believe neither Jack Dorsey nor Dick Costolo are even known outside of the tech industry, how can they manage a PR product if people barely knows them? Even Scooble would be a better fit than Jack Dorsey. If I were Twitter I'd put in charge some well known public figure with connections in the media and movies industries.

So you're basically saying Twitter should be the next Yahoo!. That didn't work out so well for them. Besides, media people are the ones who actually like Twitter as it is now: top-down broadcasts in a controlled environment with ads and analytics.

If I were Twitter I would poach Amazon executives and make them flog the company into shape: lean, dogfooding, pushing out services to the tech community, and letting new paradigms emerge before co-opting them.

To my knowledge, Yahoo! has always been led by some tech geek from the Valley, too.

Yeah but it basically lived on contracts from traditional media and ad companies, which they proactively courted. When those markets tanked, so did Yahoo.

I think Twitter is in a different position because Yahoo! has never build a bi-directional connection between producers and consumers. Obviously, that's not limited to media and ads companies. Any kind of industry is investing in PR.

I believe Twitter could succeed as a PR company but will probably fail as a tech company.

Hang on, wasn't it a couple of years ago that people were talking about "Twitter revolutions" in the Middle East? Tahrir Square and all that?

Someone posted a "show a completely random tweet" page the last time this came up, and I noticed that few of the ones I saw were in English and quite a few in Arabic.

Twitter isn't the best tool for family-and-friends; Facebook has that use case covered. But trying to turn Twitter into FB will destroy its usefulness for all the people who want it because it's not like FB. Twitter is best for the question "what's going on in the world now?"

I think the confusion here is you've assumed I meant that Twitter needs to become more like FB from a content perspective. I mean from a usability perspective. My father would like to follow along with current affairs/breaking news/sports and other celebrities.....he just can't get it to work the way he wants.

I meant that lots of people outside of the "geek" demographic clearly are using it successfully, whereas they're not e.g. using Linux on the desktop, or GNU social, or IRC, or Ello or whatever. I wonder if this is website vs app usability or similar?

It took me awhile, but I found 3 use cases for Twitter.

1) Follow interesting people in the tech industry to see what they are thinking about semi-real time. I often see links on Twitter days or weeks before they end up on HN for example.

2) Add to the entertainment experience of TV. Watching The Walking Dead, the Super Bowl, or the debates with Twitter going in the background provides insight and comedic relief.

3) Publicly shaming companies. I've done this multiple times with Comcast and they have reached out and made it right.

What I don't do is follow friends or people I know well for the most part. I already know what they think, so a stream of their thoughts does not provide much value.

I totally agree with the Dad comment here. Both my Mother and Father are hugely into Facebook, but don't understand twitter. They have both signed up for accounts, but haven't really used them, because they don't get it.

To be honest, I also didn't really understand twitter until I had to sign up for it to promote a talk I was giving at a conference. Then after playing around with it a bit, I found some interesting people I ended up following. Before that though I didn't really see the appeal. And this is coming from a tech and news junkie.

Also, diversity as it pertains to "hiring people who dislike Twitter and don't use it," which would be a great source of change from the inside. However that's very hard to do, both for the company (you want me to hire this guy who hates what I built?) and the employee (why would they join?)

"hiring people who dislike Twitter and don't use it,"

Anti-dogfooding!

>why would they join?

I don't use twitter and I'm not looking for a new job, but it seems like an interesting enough place to work.

The things that would make Twitter work better for non-techy folks are the things that would make Twitter power users the most angry: longer tweet limits, no more #hashtags and @handles, and an algorithmic timeline.

Twitter is besieged by directly contradictory demands: "Make it easier for everyone to use!" vs "Don't kill the things that make it unique and useful!"

> and an algorithmic timeline

I'd be reassured about algorithmic timelines if Twitter's attempts were not so terrible.

A year ago I started following Bob (an Internet famous personality.) Bob has made one post to twitter, and I've forgotten that I'm following him. Until one day Twitter puts a post from Ann - a friend of Bob that Bob follows - into my timeline. Ann and Bob post exclusively about eg Minecraft. I post and read exclusively about mental health treatment and stigma in the UK. I immediately unfollow Bob (because he never posts anything and I'm not interested in anything people he follows posts) and I dismiss the post and say that I didn't like it.

And Twitter will do this week after week after week. It'll post something to my timeline that my twitter account is clearly not interested in. (High end bicycles; alcohol ads; cars; etc etc).

I wouldn't mind if it was purely random - "hey, we're going to show you random shit and maybe you'll like some of it" is better than "hey, we think we know what you're interested in. We've spent time and money developing these algorithms. How about Pianos? Cod fishing? Teaspoons?"

Developing an algorithm is not the hard part. Adapting it to customer data and wishes, is.

If/when Twitter launches an algorithmic timeline, it is probably going to suck at first. Only by measuring huge volumes of user interaction with the feature, will they get enough data to make it work well.

I mean, look at this thread--people are praising Facebook's ease of use, but back when Facebook starting filtering their timelines, a) power users were super pissed, and b) a lot of random stuff showed up. For a long time there was a semi-hidden "show me all posts" option for the timeline, which power users turned on. That doesn't exist anymore, and most people don't miss it, because the filtering is good enough now.

There's not really one algorithm. There's a learning system that creates, on the fly, a billion custom algorithms--one per user.

Learning systems need two things to work well. They need a huge corpus of data, and they need clear guidance on the desired outcome. Twitter has a lot of tweets, but they won't really have clear guidance until people start actually using the feature.

I'm sure they're trying to collect some now, with their "while you were away" feature, and tracking interactions like you unfollowing Bob after seeing that tweet from Ann.

I've actually noticed this phenomenon quite a bit on Facebook in the past few years and it's part of the reason I've started withdrawing from the service. It makes me feel like I have no control over what's being displayed on my screen and that Facebook is just blasting my eyeballs with whatever is available in hopes that I will stay on the site longer, boost their metrics, and maybe click on an ad or two. (Thank God for uBlock)

Disclaimer: I've never been an active Twitter user and am probably too anti-social for my own good.

Fourth reason: Twitters product, while useful to news junkies and journalists who report on it, is actually inferior to the average person who simply wants to interact with their friends, aka Facebook.

Most of my friends actually use it as a async, direct and realtime communications channel, pretty much like Whatsapp, just with more "social integration" (read: the whole internet).

They don't use Facebook because its algorithmic "timeline" isn't realtime in any sense of the word and they consider themselves more than capable enough to decide on their own what's worth their time or not, they don't want to be fed things / advertisments somebody else wants them to see.

They'll probably all switch to the next best thing available once Twitter's rumoured algorithmic timeline is to be introduced.

Personally, I left the whole Twittersphere way back when the alienated their third party devs, for me that was more than enough indication of the way they were heading. Nowadays they have nobody left who could actually come up with the Next Big Thing (tm) for Twitter, because all of their engineers are mostlikely busy trying to figure out how to commercialize the platform in the shortest amount of time in order to satisfy their shareholders.

> ..they don't want to be fed things / advertisments somebody else wants them to see.

Good that they use AdBlock then, cause Twitter puts ads in your feed.

Not in most third party clients (e.g., Tweetbot for OS X). I've hardly used the web site for Twitter and don't really like it. I can't imagine the service without a good native client.

Yes, they use AdBlock, but there's still a difference here, right now they're seeing the tweets of their peers in-order, with ads intermixed - which makes the ads trivial to filter out (bad for twitter, good for my friends).

In the future they might see whatever Twitter thinks is important to them, which might still be ads, but in the form of other peoples / companies tweets which just "happen" to end up in their "timelines".

Now, of course they can start blocking just about every company/user they don't care / like on twitter, but the effort might not be worth the gains at some point. And who knows, maybe you won't event be able to block some things from their algorithmic timeline, because that might defeat their monetization goals.

And yes, I realize that I might be reading a lot into Twitter's actions at the moment, but given how they treated their platform in the past year(s), all I'm seeing is that they want monetize it at all costs.

Who says that has to be the use case of Twitter? HN is not very useful for interacting with friends, but it seems to do fine.

Twitter is not a great way to interact with your real friends. It's best at connecting perfect strangers with shared interests. You cultivate and refine your followees until, any time you look at your feed, it's bound to be filled with pithy and relevant observations, some of which may inspire you to tweet your own bons mots.

that's interesting -- most of my friends right now are people i met through twitter ~7 years ago. i even met my wife through it!

i quite like twitter more than facebook because it's simple to use, it has really good desktop (even linux has corebird, which is quite good) and mobile clients and the asymmetric part of friendships.

Exactly! When I see all the hand wringing around twitter, I'm surprised how rarely it's mentioned that the natural market size for twitter is just much smaller than Facebook's.

My theory is that there is basically a personality divide, probably along the introvert/extravert divide, among those who like twitter, and those who don't. Thus, those who like and use twitter frequently blame all its problems on technical details, because they can't grasp that those who don't FUNDAMENTALLY have an aversion to the push model of 140 char limited thoughts. I look at twitter and think "Random short distractions are things I'm actively trying to remove from my life."

Yes, because Twitter is not meant to be a friends only space. Its tapping into the neo-cortex of the hivemind, in real-time.

Seriously I get so tired of people who don't use Twitter and can't understand why anyone else would: the product isn't meant for you.

I take a different view – Twitter is 'in trouble' because people expect it to be far more than it should be.

It seems like it could be a really simple product – an asynchronous method to receive small updates, recommendations and so on from people or organisations you are interested in. And I love that! I follow a good selection of people who share things I am interested in. There's nothing wrong with that, and there's an obvious path (through advertising) to monetisation.

The problem is the wider perception of failure – the "Why isn't Twitter like Facebook!?!?" issue. Instead of a solid, well-delivered, sustainable product, we are witnessing a push for 'growth' and 'development' which I quite honestly think are exactly the opposite of what Twitter needs. What is frustrating me most about Twitter recently is:

- Poor technical choices (the Mac app is shit and they have repeatedly fucked over the technical community) - Fucking-up of the core timeline concept (the introduction of the 'algorithmic timeline' will be the day I leave the platform) - Arbitrarily inserting tweets from people I don't follow, nuking the whole point of it

I'd be much happier if they just slashed the headcount and built a sustainable business, but I guess that's not going to happen at this point.

They did slash headcount, but lower headcount does not necessarily mean better choices will be made, as the timeline shenanigans demonstrate.

What they need to slash is the attitude of "owning the channel".

>" Its market capitalisation is around a third of what it was a year ago, at $9.5 billion."

9.5 Billion, for Twitter...let that sink in.

Because there's no business in Twitter. There's no path to being in the black and there never has been.

Why would you believe that? They have great revenue. They're just not adding enough new users.

And if they cannot add more users, they need to streamline their operations to fit their costs into their revenues. If they choose not do so, or do not have the capability to do so, then they fail.

No argument there.

Why do they need All The Users In The World? Why can't more services be content with having a significant and active user base that is not the entire population of Earth.

I think because the network effect is a fundamental foundation of social networks. Think of all the SN's that have come and gone. It appears you can't really remain static with a non/slow growing user base. Eventually, something else comes along that has a broader range of people making the content better; you stop opening the older, more static app.

There are lots of dedicated, niche forums all over the Internet that have remained relatively stable for a decade or more. Those are social networks, and they work fine while accepting the users they have.

Q1 net loss of $162 million, it's easy to loose money, much harder to turn a profit.

What is their revenue stream? Most people I know use third party clients that show no ads or similar. Feels like everyone who has used it long enough ditches the Twitter.com apps and websites. If they stopped supporting access through third party clients a huge amount of (power) users would disappear and with them their content.

Twitter has significant revenue growth, which means they could be in the black next quarter if they didn't spend so much on trying to grow. But since they have a giant pile of cash, there is no downside to trying to grow.

> The company ended its most recently reported quarter with $3.5 billion in cash and investments, says S&P Capital IQ. If the company only burns $8.5 million a year in free cash — as it did the past 12 months — that's enough cash to last 412 years.

http://www.usatoday.com/story/money/markets/2016/01/25/twitt...

For those commenting here that they can't get into Twitter, but love Facebook, try stepping away from Facebook for a month, but leave Twitter available as an alternative. I think you will find after a month that it is much more enjoyable and useful. I think the real world analogy would be that Facebook is like going to a party where you know everyone already...it's safe and comfortable. Twitter is more like moving to a new city where you don't know a single soul. It's scary and overwhelming, but once you adapt, a whole new world opens up to you. By taking Facebook out of your daily life for a bit, you might get to experience this whole new world...if you wish to do so.

Maybe. But for most people, twitter, like Facebook, competes for our free time. And for most people Facebook is a better distraction. You can't force users to see the product a certain way; it has to be intuitive.

Oh I certainly agree, but a lot of people on here are saying they don't understand it, but want to/have tried. I'm just pointing out a way that might demonstrate to them the value it can offer. If it's not intuitive to them, that is Twitter's fault, but that doesn't mean value doesn't exist.

I am actually surprised Twitter never released a business version similar to Yammer/Facebook for Business.

There would be a lot of benefit in lightweight communication between teams and especially when integrated with internal services e.g. customer complaint received.

I can see that's an interesting idea - but most "enterprise" products already have pretty tight email integration and with the growth in popularity of IM tools is that niche really wide enough to support a "Twitter at work"?

When I was back in school, around 2007/2008, I remember reading one of those 'future-of-work' type articles where the author went on about how teams of the near future were going to keep each other updated via Twitter. Given the early direction of the product, it seemed like a foregone conclusion.

"@devTeam @productTeam @PMNameHere Currently building out remaining API endpoints. Complete by standup tomorrow #productName"

It feels like Slack ate what should have been Twitter's lunch. I don't understand why they didn't push harder in this direction.

Obsessed with becoming an advertising company for the masses, they stopped "productizing" their technology. Amazon doesn't stop other people from selling stuff with AWS servers, but that's basically what Twitter did when it destroyed its own developer ecosystem.

The parallel with Slack is very apt. The only real strength of that platform is how easily and freely it integrates with third-party services. If Skype, Facebook or Twitter allowed that freedom and ease, Slack would have never appeared. Instead, they want to maintain an iron grip on who does what (or endorse a model where your corporate sysadmin maintains such grip, like Skype For Business does), and they lose.

> Part of that drop was caused by LinkedIn, a professional social network, which forecast lower growth. That prompted jittery investors to push down LinkedIn’s shares by more than 40% and knocked down prices for Twitter and Facebook stocks too.

[citation required]

A bit off topic, but is anyone else surprised that The Economist's editors permit the use of 'newbies' rather than 'new users'?

"Third, newbies find Twitter..."

I'd happily pay Twitter $1/mo to keep suggested tweets out of my TL.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com